Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
Sam. Foreign. Welcome back to BNI in the Power of One. Thank you for joining me again today. Back with our show Topics questions topics submitted@bnipowerofone.com as always, if you have one just go there, leave it there. You could do leave your weekly presentation. It could be a business topic. What have you today's requested to be kept anonymous, which is perfectly fine. Says I would really appreciate a refresher on the importance of timely follow up on referrals. In the past two months I've sent referrals to three members in my region. Each of these referrals took no less than five days for them to follow up. In my opinion, when we send a referral it should take priority and I think the same day. How can I be more clear in communicating the fact that when I send a referral, me or the person I'm referring is ready to do business or connect. I want to make sure I'm doing everything I can, but it feels like people I'm referring to don't have a sense of urgency. I feel like this is affecting my reputation and my desire to refer to them. Thank you for keeping me keeping this anonymous in for your insight. So great question and if we just generally talk about it, I would be in agreements with you that you should rightfully expect a quick turnaround in following up on the referrals you pass and as such anything that we receive we should be trying to connect as quickly as possible. I think everybody's going to have a slightly different definition of what as quickly as possible mean. I believe it should be, you know, within 24 business hours to or 24 hours. It should be an attempt to to communicate if at all possible. There might be different expectations and cadences based on profession. So I don't know who you were referring to and and what those professions are. It could be how are we making the connection and the referral, did they even see it? You know. So you should and can pass the referrals right through the BNI Connect app. However, it is reliant on that person either having notifications turned on or be actively checking the app to see if they even got it. So depending on how that referral connection is made will help you in setting up the expectation in return. I personally, even if I was putting a referral into the app, I would be attempting to make a call to the person I'm referring to say hey, just so you know, I just entered a referral in the app and in that phone call and it can even be a voicemail say something like, this person's really expecting your call. They're excited to talk to you. If you can call them today or tomorrow, that would be greatly appreciated to kind of set an expectation. So there could be a delay that they, you know, it took them two days to even see they got a referral and that led to it. So there's a lot of unknown in the question in the exact scenario. I mean, no less than five days. That's. That's a long time. So that leads to either maybe that person isn't referable or again, maybe they didn't see it, or maybe there was something else that, that went along for that to have happened. But that to me would be pretty extreme. So it goes down to what is our number one job? When we receive a referral from a fellow B and I member, and this is any B and I member, that doesn't just mean, oh, the member in your chapter. Because it sounds like based on this question, these could be referrals to members who are not in this person's chapter because it says members in my region, not my chapter. So maybe they're passing cross chapter referrals, etc. But whether that that's the case or it's directly from a member in your chapter, your number one job is to make the person referring you look good. That's. That should be your mindset. My job is to make sure the person who took the time, took the effort, and put their reputation on the line for me. I need to make sure they look good for doing so. And the very first impression you're going to make in that role of making them look good is in how quickly and how professionally do you follow up with the person they referred you to. That should be priority. Now, that doesn't mean you stop everything you do. You know, you get a notification on your app, oh my God, I get a referral. I got to stop everything I'm doing because so, but it should not be. I'll get to that. When I get to that kind of mindset, it should be, oh, this is amazing. I need to reach out to this person today, no later than first thing tomorrow, to try to make at least the initial connection. Because again, when somebody does pass you a referral, they are putting their reputation on the line for you. And as this question kind of says, right, that they feel like they now look bad. It actually says, feels like it's affecting my reputation. And it could be. It could be. And we all guard our reputations more than anything else. Even our own physical safety. And when you start questioning if this person's affecting my reputation, I would say it would kill the desire to refer them any further. And it is amazing. It seems mind blowing that this would happen, but it does. People get these and they just kind of take it for granted and they think, well, these will come because I'm a BNI member and lose sight of the fact that you consistently need to earn the referrals you receive. You have no right to them, you still have to earn them. Your membership in your chapter and in the region, in the global organization doesn't give you the right to the people's referrals. It gives you the opportunity to earn them with the consistency of the meetings, with the setup of the meetings and, and with all of that. There is no guarantee of referrals at all. Because even if you are active, if you're doing all the activities really wrong or you're doing things like when they do test you and give you a referral, you just don't care and take too long to follow up with them. You will lose all future opportunities. If you're doing one to ones and all you're doing is selling to the people in the room, high pressure sales, not caring about learning about them. You're not going to get referrals from those people. If you're coming into the BNI meeting and doing that in your during your weekly presentation, you're not going to get referrals from people. So, you know, we talk about the power of one, obviously the name of the podcast, but the power of one report I tell everybody, being in the green doesn't guarantee results. It just means you're being active enough. Doesn't mean you're being effective enough in that activity to get results. It's. You can determine that based on the results you're getting. But this one, this kind of move of taking five days to follow up on referral, if that is just the full story of I referred them, they didn't care, they didn't follow up for five days and there wasn't other circumstances around it that would be a problem. How you kind of try to avoid that problem. So when you're passing referral, you don't put your reputation on the line. I would say again, how are you passing that referral and are you having a phone call with them? Because that would be my attempt is even if I'm putting it in the app and I'm putting all the notes in, I would want a phone call because I don't know that people have their notifications on. I don't know that they're actively checking that app and that could be causing a delay that a simple voicemail could solve and say, hey, I just put in a referral for you in the BNI Connect app and all the information's in there. They're super excited to talk to you. If you can give them a call back today or tomorrow the latest, that would be really appreciated. And again, even as a voicemail, you're setting an expectation and you're giving them a heads up to there's a referral in the app that they might not other otherwise see for five days. So without all that information in particular, just generally speaking, follow up is essential. It is vital to the success of everybody involved in that situation. I get that members can be really, really busy and it's probably unintentional to have it fall that far back, but that doesn't really matter because once it does, if you, if you're that person who doesn't have the systems in place to be able to follow up with the referrals pretty quickly, you could be hurting your reputation. You could be hurting the reputation of the person who pass past it and you could be costing yourself any future opportunity. So great question. Hopefully some idea to, to help avoid this in the future. But I think your feelings are legit and for all of us it's important to hear that to realize, oh no, these are very serious things. When somebody passes you referral, they're expecting you to really take care of that and make them look good. And waiting five days to follow up on it doesn't accomplish that. Have a great day.